Workshop Response Questions

1. A brief summary of the seminar. Include any highlights for you – new information, a particularly useful exercise, a favorite moment. Be sure to identify the main historical themes and the core documents presented in the seminar.

Most of the morning was spent discussing information from the Earle and Briggs reports that were assigned as readings prior to meeting. A great deal of analysis and discussion was put into the information presented in the reports and how it was collected. We talked at length about the way enumerators gathered their "census" information and tried to put into context how the information they were seeking changed over the decades. This was supplemented by visual images of people and a discussion of how difficult it actually is to gain the information in the reports when you are just looking at people. The afternoon was spent trying to come up with ways to use this information in the classroom. We used a worksheet to guide the process of interpreting the data and met in grade level groups to brainstorm ideas.


2. What questions did the seminar raise for you and how will you follow-up on those questions? Will you need to do further research – and if so, how will you approach that research and what sources are available to you?

The reports and primary source information given to us will be a great deal of help in the classroom. The questions I have is how to appropriately break it up and how will I use it in actual lessons. I think the workshops give us a great deal of support in various forms for ideas and materials. My own questions about the seminar were how much these reports were relied upon and how the information was used.


3. How would you use this material in the classroom? If you do not currently teach this material, pretend that you do (you may be teaching it at some point in your career!).

I think the lesson plans our group came up with are definitely things I will do with my class. If you look at my previous post, all the ideas are listed and I think they are all valuable and can be easily implemented into the curriculum. The idea of having the students take a census of teachers without letting them ask any questions is really intriguing and will go to show how difficult it may have been for enumerators to gather accurate information and would explain why their data changed so often in the census material from different decades.

4. How does the material presented in the seminar deepen your understanding of the relationship between representation and reality in the history of New England natives?

I think one of the major themes was how identity for many natives changed over time. When you look at how the enumerators were supposed to classify people and how it changed each decade, it is easy to see the trouble and possible conflict it brings up. Also, there's the issue of deception and dishonesty in reporting to a census taker. However, when you look at an individual and he goes from being classified as mulatto in one year and Indian in another, you start to see how perception of identity when it comes to ethnicity changed over time.

-Mike